Building the Future Commission: review of March

There are many highlights from our latest coverage for the commission and much more to come.

Some of the commission’s activity in March included:

• We published interviews with two big hitters in the world of infrastructure and housing, talking to Sir John Armitt about the government’s decision to scale back HS2 and to Steve Morgan about his views on Michael Gove’s “anti-housebuilding” stance
• We visited one of the UK’s largest planned timber housing development and interviewed former Greenpeace boss about ways to secure community support for relatively high density schemes in the parts of the country that tend to oppose development
• We assessed a potential new model for collaborative working and procurement being used by the Ministry of Justice for its prisons programme for our project delivery and digital stream
• For our skills and education stream of content we wanted to look at training courses that worked across disciplines, and so we focused on the PlanBEE course (the BEE stands for Built Environment Education) where students typically get exposure to architecture, civil and services engineering, quantity surveying and construction management
• We produced two in-depth pieces about building safety: the first looked at how a group tier one contractors are working together to better understand passive fire protection and today we published an article setting out the latest announcements from the Building Safety Regulator and key dates when new powers come into force.

And for what is happening in April and beyond:

• We hosted our first regional roundtable debate in the East of England in partnership with Constructing Excellence on 23 March and will be publishing a report of that debate very soon (dates for more regional debates can be found by clicking this link to our commission home page). 
• Our first commissioner meeting has been rescheduled to 25 April (train strikes affected our original date) and we expect to report back on the discussion in May
• For our project delivery stream we will look at the link between contractor margins and poor productivity and put forward a radical idea from an industry leader on how to reverse the cycle of low margins, lack of investment in R&D and productivity levels
• For our net zero and energy stream, we talk to an engineering firm advocating for the use of stone instead of concrete in modern structures - could the idea catch on?
• We will explore how design codes could be implemented to help create the communities people want to live in.

The team is working on lots more ideas that have been pitched to us, and we welcome more suggestions from readers. One way to get involved with the commission’s work is to send in a submission through our Ideas Hub - this is an online form explaining your big and idea and what impact it would have. 

You can follow our progress using #BuildingTheFuture on social media.